Acute cognitively challenging exercise as “cognitive booster” for children: Positive feedback matters!

Background and aim

Acute exercise can enhance children's cognition. Heterogeneous effect sizes necessitate investigating exercise task characteristics, contextual factors, and related affective states. The study aimed to test whether different feedback forms during acute cognitively challenging exercise affect children's executive control, alerting, and orienting performances, also considering the potential mediational role of affective states.

Methods

In a within–subjects posttest only design, 100 children (M_age = 11.0, SD_age = 0.8, 48% female) participated weekly in one of three exergames with different feedback: no feedback (NO-FB), standard acoustic environment (ST-FB), positive feedback (PO-FB). Acute bouts were designed to keep physical intensity (65% HR_max) and duration (15-min) constant and to have a high cognitive challenge. Valence, arousal, perceived physical exertion, cognitive engagement, and flow were assessed before, during and after exergaming. Each bout was followed by an Attention Network Test.

Results

ANOVAs revealed a significant main effect of feedback on executive control (η²_p = 0.09) with faster reaction times after PO-FB compared to the other conditions (η²_ps > 0.06) and on valence at post–test (η²_p = 0.11) with highest values in PO-FB (η²_ps > 0.08). In PO-FB, valence was associated with executive control (r = −0.23) but did not mediate feedback effects on executive control (95% CI [–5.25, 4.68]). Alerting and orienting performances were unaffected by feedback (η²_ps < 0.08).

Conclusion

Results suggest that positive feedback during acute cognitively challenging exergaming enhances children's executive control and positive affect, highlighting that exercise task characteristics and contextual factors are essential for cognitive benefits.